I demand a Supreme Court ruling on the registration rule

[Gabu]

Officially, we will hear arguments on this matter. If the parties wish to proceed, please continue.

Who are the parties?

jfern and the Department of Forum Affairs, I would imagine.

[Gabu]

It would appear that the rules have changed since Jfern's vote was disqualified.

The First Constitution provides:
"[V]oters may register at anytime, but must register at least ten days before any election in order to partake in the election. ... The person may be allowed to change their state of registration; however, if a change of states is not made within ten days of the election, the state from which they were originally registered shall be the state from which their vote is cast." (Article V, Clause 4)

The Second Constitution provides:
"In order to vote or be a candidate in an election, a person must have been a registered voter on the tenth day before that election." (Article V, Section 2, Clause 4)

As you can see, the two requirements are not the same. The original Constitution required registration in the district ten days before the election. The current Constitution requires registration in general ten days before the election.

Now, the Second Constitution was adopted on April 28, 2005. The special election for District 3A was held from April 29-May 1. However, I am assuming that, since the vacancy occurred prior to the adoption of the new constitution, and since the new constitution does not recognize something called "District 3A," the election was still being held under the old rules.

Thank you so much for finding this, Emsworth. It seems to explain a lot, doesn't it?

No, because Emsworth is wrong, Article 5 of the First Constitution has no section 2.

Emsworth quotes clause 4 of article 5 of the first Constitution, and section 2, clause 4 of article 5 of the second Constitution.

I think you read his statements wrong.

[Gabu]

No, you misread my argument, which is that the First Constitution is irrelevant, since my vote was denied under the Second Constitution. There is no Article 5, section 2 in the First Constitution.

Discuss the election here.

For the record, Mr Hobbes' vote is invalid under the 10-day rule since he registered in MN on 26 April.

The 10-day rule is now contained in Article V, Section 2, Clause 4 of the Constitution for reference.

Given that Peter Bell's statement includes the phrase "now contained", it seems to me that he is talking about the difference between the first Constitution and the second Constitution in that statement, and that his article, section, and clause numbers refer to the second Constitution.

Also, what does that quote have to do with your vote being disqualified?  Peter Bell was talking about Mr. Hobbes' vote, not yours, as far as I can tell.

[Gabu]

Also, what does that quote have to do with your vote being disqualified?  Peter Bell was talking about Mr. Hobbes' vote, not yours, as far as I can tell.

If you had read the thread, instead of being a pain in the ass, you'd see my vote was denied further down.

I'm not sure why you would expect me to read an entire thread when it appeared that you were just quoting one thing and made no reference to the fact that more relevant material was contained in the thread itself.

Anyway, on the Wiki it says that the second Constitution entered into force on April 28th, so it appears that the vote was indeed discounted under the second Constitution, contrary to Emsworth's arguments to the contrary.

[Gabu]

And to further complicate matters, when he certified, King didn't list the discounted votes in his certificationand the reason why.

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Fortunately, Clause 1 of Section 10 of the Unified Electoral Code Act specifies a statute of limitations on the challenging of election results:

"Lawsuits challenging the validity of certified election results shall only be valid if filed with the Supreme Court within one week of the certification of such results."

So it's not as if we can severely screw things up by overturning the results of a year-old election.

[Gabu]

Oh, yes, we are aware of that rule, senator. I believe the plaintiff's suit does relate to this past weekend's election as well.

We are just carefully considering all pertinent election laws (a practice I recommend to all). My comment was meant to convey that we do not have an official ruling from the DoFA as to the reason for not counting the vote. We can only assume from the thread.

Well yes, you just said that that "further complicated matters"; I was just making sure that that comment was in reference to this election and not that one in the past.

[Gabu]

It seems to me that "precedent" would only matter if there were a legitimate ambiguity that facilitated two or more possible readings of a legal passage.  In this case, it's fairly clear that it was simply the case that the law was incorrectly applied with regards to jfern's vote.  This incorrect application is unfortunate, to be sure, but there really isn't anything that can be done about it except to ensure that it doesn't happen again.  It certainly would be bad to make the same incorrect application a second time, because if we take this approach, we might as well not even have laws at all.